Education

About three years ago, the San Carlos Apache College located east of Phoenix began working on its mission to educate its tribe and preserve the Apache language and culture. On Friday, it's celebrating its first ever graduating class in a virtual ceremony.

The death of George Floyd, a black man in Minnesota, has sparked national discussions on police brutality. Schools across the country, including one Phoenix school district, are using this moment to evaluate the presence of law enforcement officers on their campuses.

Northern Arizona University students will start the fall semester on Aug. 12, earlier than usual and end before Thanksgiving. Arizona State University employees will be required to take and report their temperatures every work day.

The CARES Act includes provisions to help borrowers pay back their federal student loans, such as automatically suspending both principal and interest payments through September. But, while that applies to the majority of federal student loans, it doesn’t include all of them.

With Arizona on track to mark 1,000 or more coronavirus-related deaths this week, schools must figure out if it’s possible to bring back students and staff safely. The state's released guidelines on how districts could accomplish that, but its ultimately up to each of them to decide for themselves what's best for the students and parents they serve.

When coronavirus is behind us, it won’t be hard to go back and find news reports or government documents related to the pandemic, but it might be harder to find accounts of how people were feeling, or how their lives changed. The Mesa Public Library wants to archive some of those personal stories.

The State Department of Education has released guidance to schools as they prepare for the 2020-2021 school year and a return to the physical classroom. The Show spoke with Marisol Garcia, vice president of the Arizona Education Association, for a teacher's perspective.

School leaders now have guidance for reopening their classrooms for the upcoming school year, but the execution of the state’s plan will not be uniform across Arizona. In particular, small and rural districts may be facing a more difficult return to normalcy.

Guidance from the state and health department are fueling plans to reopen classrooms beginning this fall. However, Arizona Education Association’s Marisol Garcia, says this is too soon because some schools open as early as mid-July.

The Arizona Department of Education on Monday morning released its road map for reopening schools in the fall. In a letter, Superintendent Kathy Hoffman said the plan was developed with the help of public health experts and education leaders across Arizona.

A new USA Today/Ipsos survey released last week finds 20% of teachers nationally are unlikely to return to classrooms when they reopen. Marisol Garcia with the Arizona Education Association said she expects that trend to be mirrored in the state because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Arizona youth sports and summer day camps can resume, and schools will reopen in the fall following closures because of the coronavirus outbreak, Gov. Doug Ducey announced Thursday. But it won't be a complete return to normal.

The University of Arizona has fewer than 90 days to decide what its fall semester will look like and whether–and how many students–will be living and taking classes on campus. The university began holding regular updates by its task force last week, and its latest was Wednesday.

Most schools in the Valley have officially wrapped up until the fall, meaning dozens of summer camps are set to open for the next few months. However, public health officials have laid out specific safety guidelines that camps will need to follow.

The University of Arizona’s Campus Reentry Task Force is holding weekly briefings to update the public on its plans for the fall semester. Officials discussed Wednesday using a mobile app to expand the university's contact tracing efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 on its campus.

The Navajo Times newspaper is publishing news right now in the midst of a crisis for its people. But the paper began back in the 1950s as something very different. And now, the earliest years of the paper are being digitized as part of the Arizona State Library's Arizona Memory Project.